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One Small Town, Six Big-League Careers

Allie Clark, 87, was a shortstop at St. Mary’s High School in South Amboy and was part of the Yankees team that won the World Series in 1947.Credit
Marc Steiner for The New York Times

SOUTH AMBOY, N.J. — The miracle began with Allie Clark in this blue-collar town on Raritan Bay, which has become an improbable baseball factory.

A hard-hitting shortstop in the late 1930s at St. Mary’s High School, Clark was the first of six residents of South Amboy who have forged a career in the major leagues, a baseball god and five of his disciples from a city that covers one and a half square miles and whose population has never exceeded 9,500.

“It’s quite a unique fraternity,” Clark, 87, said as church bells greeted a sleepy September morning in his hometown.

In the ensuing years, the path Clark blazed from this one-ball-field town to baseball heaven was followed by Johnny and Eddie O’Brien, twins who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1950s; Tom Kelly, a player and manager in Minnesota who led the Twins to World Series titles in 1987 and 1991; and Jack McKeon, a minor league player and longtime manager who guided the Florida Marlins to a World Series title in 2003.

“At the time, South Amboy was a baseball-crazy town,” said Johnny O’Brien, 79, “and every park where we went to play, people would point to spots way beyond the outfield fences and say things like ‘Allie Clark hit one way out there.’ That’s all you ever heard, things like ‘Allie hit a home run here.’ ‘Allie made a great play over there.’ You couldn’t help but want to become the next Allie Clark.”

The tradition continues today with Kevin Mulvey, a right-handed pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks, who attended elementary school at St. Mary’s. Mulvey’s father, Tom, played high school baseball at St. Mary’s in the late 1960s with Clark’s son Alfred.

“We all have Allie to thank,” said McKeon, 79, who lives in Elon, N.C., and works as a special adviser to the Marlins. “He set the stage for all of us who followed. We all wanted to make it because he made it, so we ate, drank and slept baseball every day of our lives. No girls, no cars, just baseball.”

McKeon and the O’Brien brothers — the first twins to play for the same major league team — were seniors at St. Mary’s in 1948, 3 of the 38 boys in their graduating class.

Photo

Allie Clark, right, was the first of six players from South Amboy who have made it to the major leagues, and the first to win a world series in 1947.Credit
Associated Press

“Now calculate those odds,” McKeon said proudly.

McKeon, whose father owned a garage that housed snowplows and other large vehicles, recalled cold winter nights when he and the O’Briens turned that garage into an indoor batting facility.

“We moved all the vehicles out, put screens on the windows and lights, and took batting practice for hours,” McKeon said. “It was wonderful.”

Johnny O’Brien used to be the operations director for the Kingdome in Seattle, where he lives. “I did such a great job, they blew it up,” he said, joking.

He said that Clark was indeed an inspiration to him and his brother. Eddie O’Brien, a former athletic director at Seattle University, where the twins were basketball stars, lives in Edmonds, Wash.

Mulvey, 25, who said he still had pictures of Clark hanging in his bedroom, was dealt from the Mets’ farm system to Minnesota in 2008 in the deal that sent Johan Santana to New York. He recalled that Kelly approached him the moment he arrived in Twins camp.

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Jack McKeon, a longtime manager, guided the Florida Marlins to a World Series title in 2003.Credit
Eliot J. Schechter/Getty Images

“He said to me, ‘I know who you are, I know who your parents are, and I know where you come from,’ ” said Mulvey, who was traded to the Diamondbacks in September 2009 and is recovering from surgery to remove bone chips from his pitching arm.

Kelly, 60, now a special assistant to the Twins’ general manager, said he was “rooting hard for Mulvey because we have some definite ties.”

Speaking of the St. Mary’s Six from South Amboy, Kelly said, “It is unbelievable how something like this could have happened.”

Clark, who has six children with his wife of 65 years, Frances, never left town. On his recent visit to St. Mary’s, now called Cardinal McCarrick/St. Mary’s High School, he pointed to a parking lot by placing the tip of his cane against a window.

“That’s where our old field used to be,” Clark said. “It was actually a pretty lousy field, but it did produce five World Series championships.”

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The tradition continues today with Kevin Mulvey, a right-handed pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks, who said he still has pictures of Clark hanging in his bedroom.Credit
Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

He turned and walked slowly toward the school’s Hall of Fame Wall, two large display cases filled with trophies and plaques, a statue of St. Mary nestled between.

“I’m very proud to have been a part of this,” said Clark, as a handful of the school’s 355 students brushed past him, staring oddly at an elderly man dressed in a Yankees cap and pinstriped jersey. “My dream was to be a professional baseball player, and I lived that dream.

“The greatest moment of my life was walking into Yankee Stadium for the first time. For a small-town kid like me, it was all such an amazing thrill to have played with and against Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson and so many other great ballplayers.”

In Cleveland, he had a chance to play and room with his boyhood idol, Joe Gordon. Clark spent seven seasons in the majors with the Yankees, the Indians, the Philadelphia Athletics and the Chicago White Sox. Over the next 30 years, he earned a living as an ironworker.

Clark still boasts about pinch-hitting for Berra in Game 7 of the 1947 World Series, coming through with a single against Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers.

“Not bad for one of those kids from St. Mary’s,” he said with a soft smile, glancing at his Yankees World Series ring, its small diamonds still twinkling. “I guess we were all blessed with a certain amount of God-given talent.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 12, 2010, on Page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: One Small Town, Six Big-League Careers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe